If there's one experience in Kenya that brings me from calm to furious in ten minutes flat, its that of being ignored. That does make me sound high maintenance. I don't mean expectations of cloaks into puddles for me to walk on, or of waiters holding back chairs. I mean walking into an office, standing patiently by the sign marked 'enquiries', 'appointments' or 'payments', and watching the four people on the other side of the desk do absolutely nothing. Minute after minute ticks away.
I am a former Humanities student. I understand they may well not be doing nothing. They might well be composing poetry; musing on their shopping list for the way home; grappling with Fermatt's Theorum. But they have no outward sign of action, no pen in hand, finger on keyboard - or possibly, only an open newspaper or magazine which they are actively perusing. But nothing related to actioning the task for which one might assume they have been employed. No flick of the hair to suggest, I have seen you but am otherwise engaged. Just a moonlike vacant preoccupation, Being Important, elsewhere.
A few weeks ago I went to pay a bill for a holiday at Christmas. Two families, 8 people in total, at peak season. A sizeable amount in anyone's money. I'd phoned the office to check where they were and that they were open and turned up ten minutes later. Entered a four desk front office, with one woman 'Marketing' gainfully employed updating her facebook status, 'Accounts' reading the paper, 'Enquiries' on the phone, and 'HR' gazing vacantly. When approached, HR waved me in a general area of the seating. 'I've come to pay for our holiday,' I said firmly, thinking of the global appeal of hard cash into the bank. And so I waited. After half an hour I enquired firmly again. I only needed to drop off a cheque, but given the amount involved, and the possibility of slippage here, wanted to be clear that it had gone to the right person, for the right booking. 'Just wait.' After 45 minutes I had a firm and strident tantrum. After an hour and fifteen minutes, still with no explanation, nor arrival of any relevant person, I was ready to cancel the booking and explain, cap in hand to our visitors, why Nairobi is better at Christmas. Eventually after an hour and a half the accountant sauntered up. No explanation or communication on the delay. I still had to wait a further 30 minutes for him to laboriously write out the receipt. Two hours, plus 30 minutes travel time, to pay something, in person, in full, 6 weeks in advance, which in most countries of the world would be settled on departure from the hotel. Atua Enkop and assorted sub-camps, don't go there.
Today I took SecondBorn to the doctor. The paediatrician himself was A Delight. A location with ample parking, toys in the waiting room, communicative upbeat reception staff, payment possible by card, and himself a kindly, knowledgable, supportive doctor. So I was off my guard. But when he got out his prescription pad and started writing details of different tests needed, I started to whimper.
Medical tests are Kenyan Living (Advanced level). Cash payment needed, up front. There won't be cash points on site, at best 10 minutes drive away. But no insight into how much they will cost. 2000 KSh (£20), for a urine test, well ok, I had that. Wait 40 minutes to pay (steaming urine sample in hand) because the sole printer wasn't working and it wasn't possible to write a receipt instead of printing it. 'What, you need change as well? Just sit over there. No I'm staying here, at the head of the queue.' But then off, for the ultra sound, 20 minutes drive, to BigTeachingHospital. Which is heaving, has a complicated system with parking tokens which have to be handed back in as you fail to find a parking spot in carpark 1 but are reissued by the time you progress to carpark 3. Which is also full. Full by Kenyan standards means more than every marked parking slot occupied. Cars with chauffeurs double parked in the road. Cars without chauffeurs doubleparked everywhere. Next time we'll walk.
NHS medical receptionists aren't hired for their charming natures and warm and fuzzy people skills either. Or if they are, they soon get burnt out of them. But they do explain the system, clearly, if wearily, they do see communication as part of their role, if only to better manage expectations for a potentially volatile crowd. Not so in BigTeachingHospital's Radiology Department. A waiting room, brimful of resigned people. An 'appointments/enquiries' sign, beneath which sits a woman with no queue before her, and no intention of doing anything to create one. I ask what to do to book a slot, I wait for response. No response. No reply. On the third asking I get an airy wave to the man under 'cashier' sign, who has a queue three deep round him. At the head of the queue it takes 7 questions, and the intervention of the kindly man behind me, before I understand the logic. This queue, 25 minutes wait, is to put our papers in a wire rack infront of the cashier, to wait a second turn to come (40+ people waiting) and be allocated an appointment for another day. They need the payment, cash, 7500 KSh (£75 - or half a good Kenyan monthly wage) before you may make the appointment. No cheques no cards. 'But why can't we book the appointment now?' 'Because there are only two of us,' comes the ineffable logic.
Its like the old joke, how do you get from A to B? Well I wouldn't start from here.
Of course, having let three queues of 40 people build up, two people might find it difficult to book appointments for all of them. However if you had an appointments diary, pencil & rubber, and you allocated a slot to each person as they came in with the cash, well... how might that be to get on with?
We gave up for the day.
In my cooler moments, I've pondered about this. Working in an office is a high status job in Kenya. The status is bestowed, I think, by the contact with a rare computer, the wearing of a suit, the wielding of the receipt book, the fact of holding a job. But this status has brought with it the arrogance of the more cutting hospital consultants or the top catwalk model. Concepts of customer service are twenty years from reaching Kenyan offices. Customer is King? This is a land untouched by 360' feedback, by student satisfaction questionnaires, mystery shoppers and stakeholder feedback. Sadly, I fear, untouched for many by any sense that you are there to get the job done, unpleasant though it may be.
It doesn't just happen with face to face contact. Don't email your reservation for a night away to the Kenyan lodge or hotel. On three occasions, until I learnt better, I've emailed reservations to the address given on the lodge website, and waited up to a week and a half for a response before cracking, and phoning. In one case the hotel was even going to be closed for the whole month in which I'd requested a night's stay. Not a difficult email to write, no consultation of diaries required, but nothing.
'Why, why don't they reply. How will they ever get any bookings or clients?'
I moaned to WorldlyWise, my British friend who's been here for 17 years and whose family now run a shopping empire.
'Well Catrin, you have to remember, the people who aren't answering the emails aren't the ones who get the income or who set up the website...'
'I am a terribly terribly important person. You are an insufferable bother, and rather inadequate for needing to plague me in the first place. You will be shown your lowly position in society. But not now, later.'
It sounds like Britain in the 1970s. Sometimes you'd go into a shop and you'd sense that the assistant really resented you being there and having the nerve to want to buy their goods. Actually, it's worse than that - more like Eastern Europe before the wall came down. If the question is "Why do they treat customers so badly?" perhaps the answer is "because they can". If it doesn't occur to anyone that they can do more business by providing better customer service, then customers are never going to go anywhere else because everywhere's exactly the same.
ReplyDeleteI think it would drive me nuts, though. The idea of not being able to sort out something as simple as making an appointment at the same time as you pay your money is enough to make you despair!